“You have earned no more,” he said.  “You have earned no more, O Jehane! whose only title is the Constant Lover!” He spat it out.

She came uncertainly toward him, as though he had been some not implacable knave with a bludgeon.  “For the King hates me,” she plaintively said, “and I live beneath a sword.  The big, fierce-eyed boy has hated me from the first, for all his lip-courtesy.  And now he lacks the money to pay his troops, and I am the wealthiest person within his realm.  I am a woman and alone in a foreign land.  So I must wait, and wait, and wait, Antoine, till he devises some trumped-up accusation.  Friend, I live as did Saint Damoclus, beneath a sword.  Antoine!” she wailed—­for now the pride of Queen Jehane was shattered utterly—­“I am held as a prisoner for all that my chains are of gold.”

“Yet it was not until of late,” he observed, “that you disliked the metal which is the substance of all crowns.”

And now the woman lifted toward him her massive golden necklace, garnished with emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls, and in the sunlight the gems were tawdry things.  “Friend, the chain is heavy, and I lack the power to cast it off.  The Navarrese we know of wore no such perilous fetters.  Ah, you should have mastered me at Vannes.  You could have done so, very easily.  But you only talked—­oh, Mary pity us! you only talked!—­and I could find only a servant where I had sore need to find a master.  Let all women pity me!”

But now came many armed soldiers into the apartment.  With spirit Queen Jehane turned to meet them, and you saw that she was of royal blood, for now the pride of many emperors blazed and informed her body as light occupies a lantern.  “At last you come for me, messieurs?”

“Whereas,” the leader of these soldiers read from a parchment—­“whereas the King’s stepmother, Queen Jehane, is accused by certain persons of an act of witch-craft that with diabolical and subtile methods wrought privily to destroy the King, the said Dame Jehane is by the King committed (all her attendants being removed) to the custody of Sir John Pelham, who will, at the King’s pleasure, confine her within Pevensey Castle, there to be kept under Sir John’s control:  the lands and other properties of the said Dame Jehane being hereby forfeit to the King, whom God preserve!”

“Harry of Monmouth!” said Jehane,—­“ah, my tall stepson, could I but come to you, very quietly, with a knife—!” She shrugged her shoulders, and the gold about her person glittered in the sunlight.  “Witchcraft! ohime, one never disproves that.  Friend, now are you avenged the more abundantly.”

“Young Riczi is avenged,” the Vicomte said; “and I came hither desiring vengeance.”